A Warm Heart in Winter(76)

When he was in range of one of the windows, he cupped his hands and leaned in to see inside.

“Ooooookay.”

Beetlejuice. When the Deetzes took over the Maitlands’ nice old farmhouse . . . and turned it into a freak show of bad modern artiste crap. No antiques. No beautiful Persian rugs. No grandfather clocks, and oil paintings, and collections of Imari porcelain. In the place of all that had been venerable and cultivated over generations? Steel and leather furniture, black stone floors, and more sculptures that looked like three-dimensional Rorschach tests.

Like that red hand over there? It was a chair, right?

He’d never thought of himself as a traditionalist before, but frankly . . . he wouldn’t have given a plug nickel for the lot of it. But their taste was not his problem.

On the contrary, the motion-detector pods mounted in the corners at the ceiling were. The damn things were obvious ’cuz they had little green blinking lights—and they probably had cameras, too.

On that note, there were no doubt monitoring feeds running out here as well.

These were all his fucking problems.

Because he had to get inside.

One advantage of having to wait until twelve for the humans under this roof to hit the sack was that he’d figured out his coping mechanism. Fuck the therapy and the sniveling. He was going to deal with his brother’s death through service: Luchas had broken his heart with pain and revived him with a directive. And in honoring the request that had been put to him, Qhuinn had a job, a purpose, a direction into which he was able to channel his sadness and his sense that he could have changed where things had gone if he’d only been more attentive.

So yeah, he was getting into this fucking house and he was going to grab whatever his brother had left behind under that floorboard.

Utterly resolved, he closed his eyes and dematerialized right into the center of the . . . was it the living room? It had been a study before. Now, the place had couches, and again, was that supposed to be a chair? He guessed you could sit on that palm—

Ah, yes. The alarm.

Instantly, a high-pitched, screaming siren lit off, and given all the absolutely-no-rug, and the walls that were bare as a museum backdrop, the sound echoed around like firecrackers had been set off at his feet.

Three . . . two . . . one . . .

A light flared in the front hall, and then a set of heavy footsteps came down the staircase—along with a male voice that was muttering things about having to work in the morning, and stupid alarms, and whatnot.

Qhuinn calmly pivoted toward the noise and put his hands in the pockets of his track bottoms. His leather jacket was zipped up, but he hadn’t bothered to strap any weapons on—which okay, fine, probably proved the point that he wasn’t ready to go out into the field yet. But he had other issues to deal with at the moment, fuck him very much.

As he waited patiently, the man of the house went in the opposite direction, the footsteps growing dimmer as he headed for the kitchen end of things. Which made Qhuinn wonder. Shouldn’t there be a keypad upstairs? A remote?

Somewhere, a phone started ringing. And then there were a series of beeps.

Finally, off in the distance, that male voice started clipping out syllables that were loud enough to hear clearly.

“—no, I don’t need the police. I need a technician to come out and fix the keypad in my bedroom and that goddamn motion detector downstairs. It’s gone off again—”

The voice and footsteps got louder. And louder.

And then there he was, coming back to the stairs, the master of the house, in a pair of flannel PJs bottoms and a nylon Nike shirt. He was well into his fifties, but he’d had an eyelift and dyed his hair dark, so he could pass for forty at forty feet. No gut. Fairly good shoulders. Was probably eating keto and smoking weed instead of drinking vodka tonics to save on the calories—while he pickled himself with Botox and collagen injections to preserve as much youth as he could.

Probably on his second wife with his second round of kids.

The human stopped with the walk-and-talk.

When the guy’s mouth fell open, Qhuinn raised his hand in a little wave. Seemed rude not to offer some kind of greeting.

As the man grabbed hold of the phone with both hands and took a deep breath like he was about to blab on his midnight visitor, Qhuinn wagged his finger. “Yeah, that’s a no-no.”

He reached into the human’s brain and shut down everything. Then he isolated the two-second-old memory of Mr. I Don’t Wanna Be Old finding an intruder in his living room—along with the current signals being sent by those peepers that Qhuinn was standing about ten feet away from him.

Next came the marching orders.

Which were kind of fun.

The man cleared his throat. And then started speaking into the phone calmly, his eyes locked on Qhuinn. “Oh, sorry. No, everything’s fine. Like I said, it’s just that malfunction again. But please, I’d like to have a technician out whenever is convenient. I’m happy to work around your schedule.”

As there was a pause, like the alarm company rep had been unprepared for the change in attitude, Qhuinn was glad he’d tacked on some polite shit as a public service. He had a feeling the guy was one of those self-made sonsabitches who was a fucking prick to people.

“Thanks,” the man said to the Jake from State Farm equivalent. “That’ll be great. And I really appreciate your help. Of course, I’d love to take your customer satisfaction survey. Just send it to my email. Thanks again. Bye.”